There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful and energetic book. Many of the American Indian works I read and use in the classroom are set on or around reservations, many of which are largely rural in character. Some take place in urban settings. One of the best of those urban narratives is Tommy Orange’s There There, a novel that takes place in Oakland, California. It’s told in many voices, and many of the storytellers are intricately connected, although most of these connections are unknown. For example, without really spoiling anything, at one point in the novel, a half brother and sister — who don’t know they’re half brother and sister — stand talking with an older man and woman, who together are the parents of the young woman and don’t know it. The old man is also the father of the young man (I think at least the young man suspects this to be true). . . .

I think I might offer a graduate course in American Indian literature in Spring 2019. Orange’s novel will definitely be on the reading list.

View all my reviews

For Immediate Release

July 11, 2018

For more information: pisgahpress@gmail.com

A.D. Reed, Editor-in-chief

828-301-8968

Gabriel’s Songbook, Pisgah Press’s 2017 novel by Michael Amos Cody, nominated for Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award

Author will read and sign copies at Waynesville’s Blue Ridge Books July 21

~~~

Pisgah Press, Asheville-based publisher of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and memoirs, has learned that its most recent release, Gabriel’s Songbook, a novel by Michael Amos Cody of Jonesborough, TN, has been nominated for this year’s Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Cody will appear at Blue Ridge Books at 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 21, to read (and perform original music) from the book, and will autograph copies for those who buy or bring them. The bookstore is located at 428 Hazelwood Avenue, Waynesville (828-456-6000).

[www.blueridgebooksnc.com]

The award

The prestigious Wolfe Literary award was first given in 1955 to legendary Asheville author Wilma Dykeman for her seminal work, The French Broad, and has since been bestowed on such luminaries as Wayne Caldwell (Requiem by Fire, 2010), Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain, 1997), Gail Godwin (A Southern Family, 1987), and John Ehle (Last One Home: A Novel, 1984).

[www.wnchistory.org/awards-2/thomas-wolfe-memorial-literary-award/]

The book

Published in December 2017, Gabriel’s Songbook is a living portrait of the artist as a wayward musician. Gabriel Tucker is a young man whose talent and ambition carry him from the hills of Appalachia to the grime and glamour of Nashville … and back home again. Gritty and lyrical, rock ‘n’ roll and old-time country, it transports the reader deep into that age-old dream of making the big time, and shows us the beauty, pathos, and psychological danger that lurk underneath.

The author

Cody is a longtime professor in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. After working as a songwriter in Nashville, he earned his PhD in English from the University of South Carolina. His short fiction has appeared in The Tampa Review, Yemassee, and other publications, and his albums include Homecoming and Wonderful Life. Gabriel’s Songbook is his first novel.

The recognition

Other writers and reviewers have praised Gabriel’s Songbook. Jeff Mann, author of Country, calls the novel “gripping, poignant, and unforgettable … Artistic ambition, first love, small-town Appalachian life, along with the image-obsessed machinations of the Nashville music industry: all ring so true.”

Mark D. Baumgartner, editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, notes that “Cody writes with the vivid clarity of one who has made it through the punishing Nashville grind and survived, and the passion of a true believer in the power and beauty of the music itself. Behind the glaring lights of Nashville, the late nights, seedy managers and bad deals, is a beautiful tale of redemption and a love story that will stick with you long after the novel is finished.

“Cody is not just a wonderful writer but a top-notch musician and songwriter as well, and that musicality is in evidence on every page—from the heartfelt lyrics that occasionally punctuate the action, to simple moments like a haircut shared between estranged lovers. This is the best novel of the music business I’ve come across in a very long time.”

Charles Dodd White, author of A Shelter of Others and Lambs of Men, describes Gabriel’s Songbook as a novel “full of heart and longing … [that] deserves its distinguished place on the shelf with some of the best stories of the region.”

The publisher

Pisgah Press was founded in 2011 to publish books offering original ideas and insight into the human condition, the realm of knowledge, and the world around us. Pisgah authors include

– Robin Russell Gaiser, whose memoir Musical Morphine: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time was a 2017 American Book Awards finalist in Alternative Medicine;

– Dave Richards, a 2014 National Book Awards finalist in History for Swords in Their Hands: George Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy;

– Sarah-Ann Smith, author of the acclaimed Trang Sen: A Novel of Vietnam;

– A. D. Reed, whose Reed’s Homophones was recently featured on the nationally syndicated radio show Says You!;

– RF Wilson, creator of the Rick Ryder mystery series (Killer Weed, 2014; Deadly Dancing, 2016);

and poets

– Donna Lisle Burton (Way Past Time for Reflecting, 2016; Letting Go, 2012) and

– Nan Socolow (Invasive Procedures: Earthquakes, Calamities, and Poems from the Midst of Life, 2016).

All Pisgah Press books are available through local bookstores (in stock or special order), direct from the publisher (www.pisgahpress.com), and from Amazon.com in print or eBook format. Contact Editor-in-chief A. D. Reed at pisgahpress@gmail.com for more information.

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Title:               Gabriel’s Songbook                                                                         300 pp.

Author:           Michael Amos Cody

Print ISBN:     978-1942016366

Print price:      $17.95

e-book ISBN:  978-1942016434

e-book price:  $2.99

LCCN:            2017946781

Prayer at Zdíkov (11 July 2018)

To the Great I Am – Just as your being everywhere is mirrored in the grasses that cover this field, this Czech countryside, this globe, just as your strength is like but far greater than that of the trees that surround this field and fill the forests of Šumava, just as your spirit is felt in the winds that tumble the flowers among the grasses and the leaves in the trees, just so are your being and strength and spirit among us, your loved human beings, here on this field in Zdíkov, Czech Republic, Europe, Earth.

Many of us here know you no better than we know the grass and trees and the winds pushed along by distant storms. Many of us understand you in word alone, as we might understand what we read in textbooks about agrostology and dendrology and anemology.* But regardless of what we see and feel and know and understand, you are here in these things that surround us. You are here in us – in all of us. You are all.

Amen.

*I knew the second of these terms via research done on my in-progress short story “The Witness Tree.” I google-found the other two. The three are, in order, the study of grasses, the study of trees, and the study of winds.

I’d hoped to write this yesterday – on the 4^th of July – but wasn’t able to do so as international flying had my head in a swirl. So, a day late . . .

In 1979, I, like the proverbial prodigal son, requested my inheritance early and went into a far country. I signed up with AESU (American-European Student Union) to spend that summer traveling around Europe on a tour with forty-some other college students from across the USA (and one from Argentina and another from Canada). My group and I (codename: AESU 616, because our departure date was June 16) ended up in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on Wednesday the 4^th of July – perhaps a day just like 2018’s Wednesday the 4^th of July. I was twenty years old and in the middle of my unsuccessful run as a first-time college student. Here’s my journal entry from that day when we traveled from West Berlin in East Germany (in the DDR – Deutsche Demokratische Republik or German Democratic Republic) to Prague.

4 July (Wednesday): Day 18

West Berlin – Prague, Czechoslovakia

JOURNAL: Happy Birthday, America! And here I go plunging in to Communist country heading for Prague, Czech. We’ve been gone from the hotel for two hours, got slightly lost, and now we’ve sat at the border for an hour. I took pictures out of window of guard tower and Iron Curtain; may not come out. Sand between sections of curtain is very tilled so that one would have a hard time running to escape. We got out and built a pyramid, then played “Simon Says.” We’re wondering if we get fireworks tonight in Prague. I read some, slept, then woke up to a heavy political discussion, I take no part. Talked to an East German lady today at a truck stop; she was very nice and understood all of my Deutsch. We passed through the outskirts of Dresden, a rather large city in DDR. People stop and stare. Michael* says: center of city new because of heavy bombing (3 days & 1500 planes). Where we passed, very old and shabby; to many we seem from the future or another planet. Michael is very bitter toward Russia and socialism & a little against USA. We came to Czech, after 2½ hr wait at border (plus 1 hr for daytime), and soviet control is so obvious here; red stars, memorials, forced tour guide, etc.; Laterna Magika, 4^th of July party on top floor.

NOTES: Many signs—Long Live Friendship DDR-USSR

I saw boys working on railroad for summer vacation—no pay

Southern DDR beautifully forested and hilled—forests not as dark as BRD/Evergreens

#11 at border of West Berlin

(* Michael was our Austrian AESU tour guide. Between him and kids on the tour, we had four Michaels, so I became Moose for that summer – and forever for my AESU friends.)

That was thirty-nine years ago, and much has changed. The USSR broke apart. So did Czechoslovakia, which is now two countries, as it had been in the past, Czech Republic and Slovakia. I haven’t broken apart yet, but I’m fifty-nine years old.

On American Independence Day in 1979, whenever we were outside our hotel we were completely under the control of the Communist regime. If I remember correctly, a man or two got on our bus as we entered Prague and directed our driver through the streets, controlling what we saw of the city. When we went out that evening, the “forced tour guide” again directed our limited experience of Prague. And the next morning, we were directed to Prague castle, and then the guide exited the bus as we left the city.

In our hotel on the night of 4^th of July, a group of us went to the bar on the top floor, where we must have been quite obnoxious young Americans – drinking beer and singing songs like “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The reasons I think we were probably obnoxious is that, first, Americans traveling over here can often be that way (in a number of ways) and, second, the local patrons of the hotel bar all left the place to us.

My 2018 Prague experience of the 4^th of July was really quite different. After we arrived early in the afternoon, our group went to a hotel near the airport and checked in. No forced guides. Then Leesa and I traveled on our own by bus and subway into the heart of Prague, where we met friends and went to a music store and to a bar. We ran into a trio of young Czech and American friends. We casually experienced a beautiful historic city – the City of Love, the guard checking our passport at the Amsterdam airport called it – with only the adventurous fear of getting lost or missing a train we needed.

And on this 2018 4^th of July, I again finished the day in a hotel bar and restaurant, but the experience was quite different. Of course, being fifty-nine in the 21^st century was part of the difference. Unlike 1979, the phrase “Happy Birthday, America!” never entered my mind. My friends and I ate great food and drank beer and talked. We sang no “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Our table was near a large flat-screen TV set to CNN, which at one point reported that a Republican-led Senate panel determined that Russian president Putin helped – or tried to help – Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. So instead of 1979’s “Long Live Friendship DDR-USSR,” it now seems to be “Long Live Friendship Trump’s USA-Putin’s Russia.” Weird changes.

At fifty-nine years old, I now try to see the world as one and its people as human beings and children of God. I try to see human beings stripped of all the racialized, gendered, political, national, and economic labels that can be attached to them, labels that deemphasize – even undermine – their humanity. I try to see color only as variety and diversity and a mirror of these in the greater creation. I try to see not Americans and Russians and Czechs but people who live in America and Russia and Czech Republic. I try not to see people as poor, as immigrant, as privileged, as ignorant, but as human beings often blindly being trapped by a (largely American, I think) power structure that perpetuates these conditions in the service of a collection of greedy and Godless few that are ultimately ignorant of anything beyond their own basest desires.

All these things are too big for my little mind and limited life to battle against hand-to-hand, mano-a-mano. I’ve come to believe that all most of us can do is as the old song says, “Brighten the corner where you are.” So, I teach in classrooms, write here and elsewhere, and live as best I can to enlighten and speak truth, not indoctrinate. And so, I come to the Czech Republic, to share the English language with friends who want to learn, to sing songs and play softball with children and young friends who like to sing and play as children tend to like to do around this one world.

(NOTE: By “inheritance” above, I mean about $2,500, which was half of what Mom and Dad had received from the sale of a piece of land.)

I’m not sure how long I smoked cigarettes. Probably since the 8th grade, however old I might have been at that point. Maybe cousins from Michigan smoked. Certainly John Deaver, a new kid at school that eighth-grade year smoked. I got into it somehow.

Like most, I guess, I got caught after a fairly short period of sneaking cigarettes. I remember sitting on the front porch with Mom, who basically said that, since your dad smokes, we can’t really tell you not to, but we’ll never by cigarettes for you.

Perhaps one of the stupidest things I ever did was related to smoking. Our JV basketball team played one winter night at another school — could have been Erwin High or Pisgah High. After our game, while the girl’s were playing, I went outside and walked around the parking lot, testing the doors of cars and trucks, looking for one that was unlocked so I could sneak the use if its cigarette lighter. I think I eventually found one and had my smoke, but somebody saw and reported me to my coach — Johnny Fisher, I think. I had to run a bunch of laps. Thinking back on it, I see now that was many worse things could have happened as a result of such stupidity.

I remember smoking in restaurants. I even remember smoking in the classroom at Mars Hill College in the late ’70s. I remember smoking on airplanes. We smoked about anywhere we decided to back then, except church — I don’t remember ever smoking in church.

Smoking seemed to be part of my writing process. I often sat somewhere — a kitchen table, perhaps — with my guitar in my arms, my pencil in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. When smoking outside became a thing, a requirement, I spent valuable writing time, telling myself I was thinking, standing outside in rain or shine or heat or cold or day or night, smoking.

I never was really that fond of smoking. I wasn’t crazy about the taste, which lots of smokers claim to like. I didn’t like the smell of it — on me or in ashtrays. I grew to hate the litter of butts that was everywhere. At a certain point, I refused ever to throw down a cigarette or toss one from the car. Wherever I was, I flipped the burning tip off and put the butt in the trash or in my car’s ashtray.

Seventeen years ago, in 2001, June 30 also fell on a Saturday. Leesa, Raleigh, and I had spent the year in Murray, Kentucky, where I had my first tenure-track job at Murray State University. In late May or early June, we moved back to Asheville in preparation for moving to Johnson City, Tennessee, where I would begin my second tenure-track job at ETSU in August. But first, I had to leave the family and return to Murray for five weeks, where I was to teach a summer course.

On that Saturday morning, I left our house in Arden, North Carolina, south of Asheville. I drove out Airport Road and stopped at a convenience store just to buy a pack of cigarettes before I got on I-26 to begin the long drive to Murray. I smoked on 1-26. I smoked on I-40 in North Carolina and Tennessee. I smoked with my friends Mark Chesshir and jb during a stopover in Nashville. I smoked on I-24 in Tennessee and Kentucky. I smoked through the Land Between the Lakes.

I smoked the last of the pack — a yellow box of American Spirits — as I drove into Murray late that night. I would be staying the first few nights at the home of my MSU colleague Warren Edminster, who, along with Laurie and his three daughters, would be out of town for a few days. Because of the girls, it was a no smoking house. (I remember Warren and Laurie saying that they were going to start smoking again when they turned 70.) Add to that, no place in Murray sold those yellow boxes of American Spirits.

So, I quit smoking. Just like that.